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“Your snakes are anacondas. The alpha you took was a cobra. You can’t rule over a type of snake you’re not.”

“Why not?” he asked, and he started to stalk towards me, still in human form, but with that tense grace that is more animal than human.

I didn’t have a good answer for that one. “Are the alphas alive?”

He shook his head. “I hear fighting, Anita. What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re lying. I can smell it.”

Okay. Maybe truth would help. “The sounds you hear are the cavalry riding to the rescue.”

“Who?” he asked, voice almost pure growl. He was still stalking towards me, and I was still backing up.

“Rafael and his wererats, probably the werewolves by now.”

“There are hundreds of werehyenas in this building. Your cavalry cannot get through them in time to save you.”

I shrugged, afraid to tell the truth, afraid he’d take it out on the werehyenas’ lovers. And I didn’t dare try to lie; he’d smell it. So I just kept backing up. We were almost to the door. If I could get it open, maybe he’d chase me. Maybe I could lead him into an ambush of my own.

Abuta moved in front of the door. I’d forgotten him, and that was careless. Not fatal, not yet, but careless.

I pressed my back to the wall so I could keep an eye on both of them. Abuta stayed by the door, the message clear that if I kept away from the door he’d keep away from me. Chimera, on the other hand, kept stalking closer. I was between a panwere and a snake—not actually a rock and a hard place, but close.

Chimera flowed into his other form. I’ve seen shapeshifters change for years, and it was always violent, or messy. But this, this was almost . . . breathtaking. Scales flowed over him as if they were water. There was no clear fluid, no blood, nothing but the change, as if he stepped from one form into another, like Clark Kent changes into Superman. It was so quick it was almost instantaneous. He didn’t even miss a step. His clothes folded away like the petals of a flower falling to the earth, and he stepped out in the snake form of Coronus. The big snake man stopped moving. He froze in that stillness that reptiles love. I froze when he did. He finally turned his head so he could look at me with a copper eye. It must have played hell with his depth-perception having to do that.

“I remember you. Chimera told us to kill you.” He looked around at the dark room and said slowly, “Where are we?”

Then he bent over as if in pain, and the next form was human but not Orlando’s body. He was Boone and before Boone’s eyes had lost their confused look, he was a lion man. For a second I thought it would be Marco, but of course he couldn’t be both Marco and Coronus; not even Chimera could pull that one off.

He was golden, tawny, muscled, masculine, with a mane around his half-human face that was almost black. The claws on his hands were like black daggers.

“This form is truly mine,” he growled. “The snake and the bear are like Orlando, they still believe in themselves. But I am all there is, and there is nothing but Chimera.” He reached for me, and I bolted. I ran towards the hanging men, because I knew they’d slow him down, then turned at the last second, so fast I fell on the ground and skittered away on hands and feet like a monkey. They would slow him down, but he’d cut them up to get at me. I couldn’t let that happen.

He cornered me on the far side of the room—farthest away from the door and Micah. I think he could have caught me sooner but he wasn’t rushing. I don’t know why. The sounds of fighting were closer, but not close enough.

Chimera came at me like grace contained in violence, a mountain of tawny muscle and fur that gleamed in the lights. He opened his mouth and roared, a sound I’d never heard outside of a zoo before. That coughing roar made me stand a little straighter. Zeke and Bacchus had promised to come get us out of here before the rest of the fighting started. They’d failed, or lied, but I wasn’t going down without a fight, and I wasn’t going down screaming. I watched him come towards me, like a slow-motion nightmare,